Lucking Out - James Wolcott [133]
Coda
Here’s how I remember it, the moment for me when the doorknob turned and the seventies were truly over.
It was after an evening showing at the now-gone Loew’s Tower East of The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving as rival concert pianists whose inconvenient romance prickles every passive-aggressive nerve in Dreyfuss’s acting quiver, his character’s male ego in danger of developing a bald spot from too much rubbing. He wants her so bad, but can’t accept that she might out-Rachmaninoff him! For some reason, Pauline Kael hadn’t caught the film when it was screened for critics, and so her review would run late, weeks after its December release. After her sojourn in Hollywood, Pauline had returned to active duty at The New Yorker in June 1980 with a long take on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that seemed to mimic Kubrick’s Steadicam tracking through the remote snow, followed by a state-of-the-art polemic called “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers,” in which she took what she had learned at Paramount, shaped it into a plasticine bomb, and set it off. Colonized by conglomerates that knew and cared nothing about movies themselves, studios were now run by executives who hedged their bets by green-lighting package-deal projects whose premise could be boiled down to a sound bite: “The higher the executive, the more cruelly short his attention span.” Beneath the bureaucratic inertia and servile bowing to the balance sheets, chaos. “Nobody really controls a production now; the director is on his own, even if he’s insecure, careless, or nuts.” If her sabbatical had been a sour education, worse was on the way now that Pauline was back home. In August, Renata Adler, she of the bell-ringer braid, a longtime New Yorker contributor who had been one of the relievers rotated out of the bullpen to review movies in Pauline’s absence (along with Roger Angell, Veronica Geng, and Donald Barthelme), fastidiously shoved a steel safe off the roof of the New York Review of Books, an eight-thousand-word flattener titled “The Perils of Pauline.” Judgment had fallen. It read like an autopsy report filed by the archangel of death whose pen was her scalpel.
Occasioned by the publication of Kael’s latest collection, When the Lights Go Down, the scale of the vivisection combined with its methodical thoroughness indicated months of preparation intended to deliver a coup de grâce. Once upon a time, when unicorns gamboled, Adler had entertained fancies that Kael might be a critic to marry the distinguished mind of Robert Warshow with the frequency of the political columnist Walter Lippmann (how’d he get in here?). But the cucumber slices had fallen from her eyes. “Now, When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or [John] Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture.” It was as hyperbolic an exaggeration as Mary McCarthy’s assertion that every word of Lillian Hellman’s was a lie, including “and” and “the,” and Adler was just getting started. The publication of “The Perils of Pauline” hit Pauline hard. Not so much the meat and particulars of the essay, though these damaged and vexed. “She’s trying to take away my language,” Pauline told me, “to make me so self-conscious that every time I ask a rhetorical question or do something jazzy I’ll catch myself and worry, ‘Is this something everyone will jump on?’ ” And she found Adler’s elevation of “the intermittent critic” over those who covered a critical beat absurdly snobbish and patrician, as if anyone